We lived in a police house just outside the police station on the edge of Manchester in Ashton-under-Lyne. I was around 22 and had just left art school in Manchester, scraping my diploma, and feeling a little sore at just scraping through, but looking back it was probably about right. I was in a year that shone but the light coming from me was more of a flicker than a beam. I was determined to get off my backside and get a career in advertising as a so-called ‘creative’ in London. There was a plan to share a place in the capital with Al and Dave, but it was a fairly woolly plan, so for the time being I went ‘home’ to my Mum and Dad.

They had moved house frequently over the years, and this latest one to Ashton came with yet another promotion for my Dad. He was now a chief superintendent in charge of the Oldham division with two sons, one away in Hull at art college and me now at home having left art college, and with no work.

Always supportive he said, ‘Don’t worry, I’ll look out for a job for you to tide you over’. I wonder now if he did this out of enlightened interest, not wanting me to work with his personal ‘clients’ as he called them.

My plan was to live at home at their expense, save enough to go and look for a job in London where the world would be my oyster. My mum approved and after living in various flat shares and ‘digs’ ( why were they called that?) in various parts of Manchester, I was settled into a routine of keeping in touch with old friends from college socially and trying out a new less than glamorous daytime job sweeping loading bays at a factory in Oldham. I didn’t last long. The foreman who was away on his annual holiday when I joined had an evil reputation and on his return advised me that he simply ‘hated students and did not know why I’d been taken on’. Nice? My explanation that I was no longer a student held no water for him; he simply muttered that I was ‘tainted’ as if it were a virus.

I looked elsewhere for gainful employ. A minor claim to celebrity fame was that my p45 ( the official form for the fired or unemployed worker ) was handed to me by the brother of Eric Sykes. Eric, being at the time a well-known comedian, his brother was the accountant at the firm whim gave me the boot and seemed somewhat humourless.

Eventually I found work as a van driver for Park Bakeries in Oldham. Getting up at 3.00 in the morning to get cakes delivered to shops and Marks and Spencer’s all over the North West, and at times as far as Yorkshire. Good money, I liked it so much Mum worried that it might be permanent.

The social round tended to include Krystin, a smashing blonde girl who lived with her Polish Dad and English Mum in Denton nearby. To prevent any misunderstanding, she said she had a boyfriend called Trevor; I never had the pleasure of either meeting Trevor or getting to know her better. I think now that Trevor’s might have been a clever invention to keep our relationship where she wanted it. Chaste instead of chased.

We were in the habit of going out to a pub on the edge of Manchester in the little village of Hadfield for the evening. In the days when you thought nothing of driving to pubs and the having a couple of pints of Boddingtons best bitter, and perhaps a portion of scampi and chips in a basket ( a real basket! ) a heady mixture of alcoholic risk and possible salmonella. Driving my mum’s mini, I arrived at Krystin’s house ready for one of these outings. A neat little terraced house, it was one of many in the area, near the big bakery factory where her dad worked. She invited me in to meet him. Warm and friendly and with a distinct Polish accent, he ordered me to sit and ‘hev sendwidtch’. I’d just had food at home and said I was fine thanks, but he insisted he make me ‘sendwitch’. Working at the bakery he got his bread for free. Krystyn looked at me as if to say that I should agree. She was sporting a dress that left little to the imagination and her father looked like a man prepared to defend her reputation. In this case with a huge plate of ham sandwiches, which they insisted I eat.

Any thoughts or inclination to further our relationship were glued up then and there in that huge plate of sandwiches. Trevor never mentioned, no need.

Krystin and I kept in touch for a while, even in my early days in London. She came to stay with me and my flatmates and offered to cook a meal for us, and it was lovely. The washing up took us days, she managed to use every pan and utensil we possessed.

Lovely girl, I can’t think of her without the image of a ham sandwich springing to mind.

Below is a poster I did for a retrospective exhibition we had some years ago now, at Manchester School of Art.
Krystin is in the group in the middle with her mouth wide open, and I am the dour bloke with his old school scarf on, in the front row, 5th from the left. She was a lot prettier than this suggests, and I was naturally better looking. The fine cartoon was done by Anthony Woolaston, the bloke in glasses on the front row just in front of Krystin. At the time of publication, we could not find him but subsequently did. Sadly, he and a few more in this image are no longer with us.